after looking at a few options I came to the conclusion that I have to retire my old desktop PC. The MSI Z370-a PRO has a weird pcie slot distribution and it doesn’t allow to build the NAS I want.
Because of that I’ll turn my Lenovo P620 into a TrueNAS + homelab for the time being. It has plenty of RAM and PCIe slots to future proof it for quite some time I believe.
The problem is internal space for disks, it’s very constrained and anything beyond 2 x 3.5" is pushing it. Internal enclosures for 5.25" bays fit but without fan at the end and I can’t add more than 3 x 3.5" for the 2 available 5.25" empty bays, so I want to go the JBOD enclosure route. That will allow me to grow the pool with time.
The question is what to get, I really don’t want anything USB and those are the majority and the cheapest as well. Ideally I would want something in tower form factor with at least 8 bays 3.5" and external SAS 3 connectors. The best one I found is RocketStor 6438TS, what do you think about it?
Do you have experience with any other that you would recommend?
I can’t find more options and the lack of response here convinces me that probably is not the right way to go. It’s just that rackmount servers are so loud…
That qnap looks good but I guess that’s why there are not too many options, they are too expensive.
Just thinking outside the box here, with black Friday so close, what about DIY one?
Any idea what kind of setup is required? Specifically I like the idea of using one enclosure for two different NAS systems. Not even sure if it’s possible, I’ll take a look later.
That looks great, I’ll look more into it this weekend. I’ve seen other videos from that guy, very handy.
About my setup, I don’t have anything right now. I’m thinking of getting a full tower and see how many internal and external drives I can fit in with large fans so they don’t make a lot of noise. Besides DIY in itself, I like the idea of this approach because I can add more drives and bays as I see it fit. Not sure if connecting it to 2 NAS is possible, the video talks about daisy chaining them but I don’t think it’s the same use case.
Thanks!
I’m revisiting TL-D400S | High-performance desktop SATA 6Gbps JBOD storage enclosure | QNAP (US)
Brand new is $299 so it’s not that bad and 4 bays is enough to get started. Going over the documentation, I’m not too confident that I’ll be able to use it with a TrueNAS scale VM over proxmox. I’ll order it and if it doesn’t work I’ll try to use a lsi 9200-8e instead of what it comes with.
I like the idea of DIY jbod but this should work short term.
I was recently considering some of these types of enclosures and ended up just building a full file server with some of the following;
Fractal Define 7 case
Asus B550 motherboard
Ryzen Pro 4350G
64GB ECC memory
LSI 9201-16i SAS HBA with SAS → SATA break out cables for 16x HDD’s
a bunch of 20TB HDD’s from ServerPartDeals
I guess its even more expensive than a JBOD enclosure but it also gives you about 4x more drives.
maybe not what you want but I have futzed with the external enclosure setups for years and I am just getting tired of having drives in boxes dangling around plugged in to other systems. Decided it was time to just internalize. Also keep in mind that you cannot access SMART details on HDD’s typically over these external enclosures aaaaaand I just had a drive fail on me, might not have caught it if I was not checking SMART and definitely could not have diagnosed it as easily.
Generally, I think, unless you specifically need a dumb exterior enclosure for…some reason…any sort of NAS/File Server/Other type of server, is almost always better served by purpose-building such a server. Be it through buying a rack mount server or case, or just building your run of the mill consumer grade PC and cramming it full of drives. Most of what makes these JBODs worth buying is software. Only exceptions I can think of is NVMe arrays, like Asustor’s stuff. Consumer grade stuff doesn’t really facilitate that well, but even then, if you have hardware laying around, a switching PCIe add-in card can manage it.
Yup. A reason for the muted response here is “…a lot of the time these USB enclosures have absolute garbage chipsets…” and, as Wendell points out there, it’s not until the fairly recent 3.2 gen 2 enclosures things have gotten a bit better. Besides the QNAP that’s been mentioned, Asustor AS5004U and AS60004U are the NASy enclosures I’m aware of which seem to have decent chances of robustness.
TL-D400S’s US$ 300 and AS5004U’s US$ 320 with more restricted airflow, though. So like @gc71 pointed out, loading up a Fractal Meshify 2/Define 7 (XL) and using chipset+ASM1166 SATA or LSI/Broadcom SAS is less hassle, more cost effective overall, often easier to manage, and gives more bays. Meshify 2’s also about as good it gets for airflow in desktop hardware.
At work we do 9500-16e to 4U JBOD for this type of setup.
Yeah, there’s that topological unevenness between CPU and chipset attached NVMes and the current lack of PCIe 5.0 PEG breakout boards. But 5-6 4.0 x4 drives off the CPU plus another 2-4 4.0 x4s on a 4.0 x4 or x8 uplink from the chipset is not bad.
Agreed, a dedicated NAS system will be better but based on what I have I’m sort of stuck with the Lenovo P620. If I can find another another role in the future for it, I sure will build a dedicated NAS
Yes, the more I read about it the clearer it became I’m deviating from the norm quite a bit here. I didn’t know 3.2 gen 2 was acceptable though, I’ll check that up, out of curiosity.
What it’s still not clear to me if I can use one enclosure for 2 systems. Say the enclosure has 8 bays, can I use for example a LSI 9300-8e from system A and connect 4 bays to it and then do the same from a LSI 9300-8e from system B? then both systems have 4 disks each?
I’ve found details to be scarce. My guess is 5 Gb quad bays mostly suck because they follow a USB to SATA bridge with a JMB575. JMB575s just seem to be flaky, some of which is probably attributable to often not being used with heatsinks. 10 Gbs appear likely to be ASM235CM or ASM1352R, both of which are plausibly dual SATA port, enabling quad bay implementations with dual ASM1092s.
FWIW, my experience of ASMedia and Jmicron SATA stuff is ASMedia’s definitely more solid.
Seems to me the main issue here’s how crappy most JBOD enclosures are. I’m pretty chary of HighPoint in general and, for the price of something like a ThunderBay Flex 8, it makes more sense to buy a NAS. Another option’s putting a power supply in a Silverstone CS382 but that too costs enough it starts to make more sense just to do a build.
ah ok, so it should work as I described, good to know because I wasn’t sure I was understanding it correctly. I do see your point that it might not be reliable though, or even cost effective.
Thanks!
The 93xx has a significant advantage over the 92xx beyond 6gb vs 12gb.
With 12gb came a feature that lets you combine several hard drive streams onto a single channel. If you are using rotational media, instead of 2x the bandwidth you effectively get 5x the bandwidth.
Also the 9xx5 cards are second generation and use 15 watts instead of 45-70 watts.
Also cable lengths over 1 meter make sata unreliable. So use sata in the box, and sas between boxes. ie put a PSU, sas expander, and a bunch of sata hard drives in a budget PC case, then hook that to your computer with a sas cord.
surprisingly, there actually still is at least 1 reason to do a JBOD in external enclosure ; Backblaze.
Backblaze has famously offered a flat-rate unlimited backup for attached storage volumes on Windows and macOS. If the idea of running a Windows backup server sounds bad to you, the only other option then is Mac, which generally has non-existent expansion options in their most common systems. For this reason I still run a separate Mac Mini + external HDD enclosure OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad Four-Bay Storage Enclosure specifically for the purpose of getting Backblaze to backup a portion of my personal data. One giant downside to this is the limited options for filesystems and inability to get SMART data from your drives.
This is really the only use case I have been able to find for these types of configurations with external enclosures, and it would be rendered irrelevant as well if Backblaze stops offering this service lol
for my “real” file server I do use a LSI 9201 HBA card attached to multiple internal HDD’s
I wasn’t aware there were usb enclosures worth considering. good to know.
I ended up buying QNAP TL-D400S but returned it because it was too noisy. I tried Icy Dock flexiDOCK MB830SP-B but ended up returning it for the same reason.
Because of space constraints in my NAS and the noise HDDs make I ended up going the NVMe route, I got a Sabrent PCIe gen4 x16 to 4x M.2 NVMe. Cost wise it almost makes no sense but I love the speed, how quiet and how tidy the inside of the case is with no wires whatsoever
The RocketStor 6438TS is your best option for a tower JBOD enclosure with SAS3 and 8+ bays for 3.5" drives. While alternatives like the AkiTio Thunder3 or Promise J2i exist, they have fewer bays or cost significantly more.
External SAS3 JBOD may be a right choice given your P620’s space limitations. This lets you expand storage over time while keeping high-speed connectivity between TrueNAS and the drives.
